Negatory
2yr ago
Trump was president in 2020.
So it’s strange you bring up the Floyd situation in response to that comment talking about complaints after Trump left office.
Negatory
2yr ago
Biden has not been “extremely moderate” even if he hasn’t given the progressives everything they ever wanted.
He’s significantly to the left of Obama by any consistent measure.
But your overall point stands IMHO.
Negatory
2yr ago
I think you don’t understand what the posters above meant by “internal locus of control” and you are not distinguishing blaming external factors vs. seeking external assistance.
“The whole world is against me.”
Vs.
“I need help to overcome a challenge.”
Negatory
2yr ago
I cannot emphasize enough that it’s not a zero-sum game of political capital either.
The US should be concerned with Russia and China. This is not a new thing.
What is a newish thing is the US focusing on potential conflict with near-peer rivals instead of insurgents/terrorists.
What is also a new thing is that a wing of the GOP is soft on Russia. The true objection is not that we are supporting Ukraine in a way that actually inhibits our ability to deter China.
Ukraine is, from our perspective, a tiny conflict. We are not mobilizing troops or significantly shifting our defensive posture or strategy. We have tons of old equipment to give them. It also turns out we have let our 155mm shell production atrophy. Let’s fix that.
The GOP used to be full of people very concerned about appearing weak to any adversary, because they understood deterrence means being threatening. Now they’ll say we should let Putin have what he demands.
China will take it as a positive sign if US infighting reduces support for Ukraine because they want the same kind of infighting regarding Taiwan.
Negatory
2yr ago
What no.
Blaming external forces or only relying on external assistance is a lack of an internal locus of control. That can lead to learned helplessness.
Accurately perceiving one needs external support for something and seeking it is being agentic. Not seeking external help when it is needed is an unhelpful avoidance pattern and rarely leads to good outcomes.
Negatory
2yr ago
Yeah it’s incredible to watch biologists deny even simple biological reality when it clashes with progressive orthodoxy. They have to play word games with “population” and “spectrum” to convince themselves they’re not giving aid and comfort to their ideological enemies.
There’s biology and then there’s human biology. It’s as if humans had their own physics.
So it’s refreshing to this commenter just applying basic logic, as if the progressive worldview is coherent.
I think it’s a combo of motivated reasoning, self-delusion, and indoctrination. Rarely is it intentional lying. Plenty of ideologies and religions will cause people to exhibit this kind of behavior to overcome contact with inconvenient facts.
Negatory
2yr ago
-> And that’s your fault and you need to overcome it because no one else can do that for you.
Just gotta take it one level deeper.
Of course, there’s depression and then there’s depression, and seeking necessary external help is part of taking responsibly.
(I have not fully embraced radical self-ownership, but I think there’s a lot of merit to it.)
Negatory
2yr ago
This could be used to teach a class on propaganda and doublethink:
https://old.reddit.com/r/genetics/comments/14rgx56/how_can_race_and_iq_possibly_be_genetically/
Freedom of speech matters, it seems.
Negatory
2yr ago
I came across this long form article on genetics and race in TIME from 2014.
I’m impressed it was published at all and that it’s still online. Written by a former NYT editor no less, taken from his book.
https://time.com/91081/what-science-says-about-race-and-genetics/
It was denounced, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Troublesome_Inheritance
Still, I can’t imagine any mainstream publication coming within a mile of “race” correlating to “genetics” today.
Geneticists have to be the biggest deniers of anything associated with race because they fear the backlash. Hell of a situation to be in. Good thing there’s only strong and increasing genetic evidence regarding populations, which have no overlap or correlation with race whatsoever.
A current example, drama over a genetics chart perhaps showing racial categories:
https://old.reddit.com/r/biology/comments/1ay54u4/all_of_us_genetics_chart_stirs_unease_over/
https://old.reddit.com/r/genetics/comments/1ay42d3/comment/krsjl7c/
Negatory
2yr ago
Who here is arguing against individual merit?
Receipts please.
“HBD” has contested definitions. You seem to be defining it here as some kind of normative claim that we should “sort by race” instead of the “sort by individual IQ” people around here would prefer. Race-blind individual meritocracy, if you please.
I think you’re also probably confused about IQ being used as a filter to sort for high potential individuals and somehow end up trying to disbelieve IQ has the predictive power it does.
Or you have some boutique definition of individual merit.
Negatory
2yr ago
I think claims made based on anything produced by academia in the last half-century or so.
You should be happy to know that the US military’s use of standardized testing goes back more than a century. For college too actually.
And you not accepting low IQ levels of criminals and trying to blame this on academia is frankly just an impressive way to think.
You’re a rare flower that hates academia but also agrees with it on race and IQ being made up and used by bad people for bad purposes.
Negatory
2yr ago
Why is that its primary role?
Why does the US military use it so heavily?
Even if that’s how it was being used, you’re not invalidating the massive amount of evidence that IQ correlates with performance.
And well beyond the things the “chattering class” have any direct interest in.
Negatory
2yr ago
I like this article overall and appreciate he’s trying to strike a balance between competing concerns.
The problem with his analysis is that it’s wrong. DoD efforts re: Ukraine are not zero-sum with deterring China. (And Putin paying a heavy price sends a warning to China, too.)
The West in general, even the US, has let military production capacities contract significantly over several decades, as China has massively expanded the quality and quantity of its armaments and production.
People pointing out our shortfalls of say manufacturing artillery shells in a sustained conflict (or worse, ships) didn’t get very far. These problems are not new, but not seen as urgent.
Putin invading Ukraine did three great things for the West. First, it committed Russian forces to a very costly war. Second, it reminded the West that real wars can still happen and led to more unity. Third, it’s demonstrating some of the aforementioned shortfalls and “priming the pump” for the US to reestablish production capacities. The money we spend on armaments for Ukraine is going to US companies.
If you really care about our ability to deter China and win a war, you should support building warships as fast as possible at scale for Ukraine. That way, we’re capable of actually doing that for us. Or we could build the new ones for us and donate older ones to Ukraine.
I’m only half-kidding. We need more warships and we are so slow at production now.
At any rate, any China hawk who is against our support to Ukraine is bad at geopolitics and logistics.
Negatory
2yr ago
If you read the link that breaks down the documents Trump took it was quite a bit worse than what you laid out here.
And it wasn’t to conduct US government business.
And he refused to comply with federal authorities.
He got raided and prosecuted because he willfully ignored the law, even after federal authorities were aware of the violation.
Even if I grant your worst-case version of the Clinton server scandal, it pales in comparison to Trump running off with some very sensitive reporting and sharing it for his own purposes.
I gotta say it’s funny you linked me to what a SCIF is when I spent more than a decade working in one. There’s a good chance I contributed to reporting that made it into one of the PDBs Trump took with him (if the guess about one of them is correct based on the date).
I would be perfectly happy to see stricter punishments for irresponsibility with classified data.
Negatory
2yr ago
Do you remember taking the ASVAB?
Do you remember how certain jobs had a minimum GT score? Do you recall jokes about people who needed waivers?
The US military did studies in the WWII era that showed dumb people are more likely to fuck things up and be bad at their job. So the US military tries to keep the real dummies out altogether, and requires above average scores for many jobs. Becoming a pilot requires passing an extra test with a general aptitude section. Getting into the Defense Language Institute requires a good score on a language-learning aptitude test, which basically measures verbal IQ.
MacNamara decided to lower the minimum IQ to expand options for recruits/draftees. It did not go well.
So the moral of the story is that IQ is real and it matters.
You believing MacNamara made bad decisions is in line with him making a bad decision about lowering IQ requirements.
You’re smart enough that we should not have to tell you that if you enlist a bunch of low IQ people there’s going to be “disparate impact.”
Obviously there’s an HBD angle.
Negatory
2yr ago
That was a perfectly fine comment.
I can predict how much my posts will be downvoted by simply thinking how much I’m going against the Motte’s grain. So when I comment about evidence for HBD, I get upvoted, and when I say anything negative about Trump, I get downvoted.
I’m always amused when I get downvoted for expressing something directly in line with Siskind-Yudkowskian thought. The apple has fallen far from the tree here, on some issues at least.
(Of course, the SSC subreddit just had a post where someone asked why there was so much discussion about IQ and a significant number of commenters took the “IQ is meaningless” line, which is even more ironic.)
You said something positive about Blue and negative about Red, so you were obviously going to get heavy downvotes no matter what the truth or quality was.
@ymeskhkout gets heavily downvoted for his election comments every time.
If we all just try to avoid downvotes, we will just lose contrarian views (ironic in a place overrepresented with irascible contrarians).
Negatory
2yr ago
Keep in mind that if you run some scenarios on holding bonds to buy cheap stocks during cyclic downturns you might find that timing the market (even optimistically doing so near optimally) might not pan out because of lost gains during all the years when stocks just did average.
You bring up another good point that I know some people do and I wish I did (or could do, now; I have a job that prohibits playing the stock game). Some people employ a strategy that’s like “90% boring index funds and assets based on standard investing advice” combined with “10% YOLO/WallStreet Bets/trying to beat the market”. Helps scratch the day trader itch and limits downside risk ruining one’s retirement.
Something like that, having a set level of risk, might help you edge away from the anxiety.
Negatory
2yr ago
But I do have to take your point when I consider how things are today in the UK.
Negatory
2yr ago
McNamara ignored established DoD policy based on intelligence testing and job performance.
It didn’t go well.
It’s a famous case to cite when people want to believe that IQ doesn’t correlate to job performance. People here would assume you know that context.
Note the serous irony of you criticizing WEIRD utilitarian optimizers for trying to fix things where the “one weird trick” was IGNORING THE WELL-ESTABLISHED LINK BETWEEN INTELLIGENCE AND JOB PERFORMANCE.
You understand half of why McNamara and his Whiz Kids made a mistake; just not the half that contradicts your views and explains why the example was cited.
Negatory
2yr ago
Wages are ultimately set by productivity and what people are willing to pay. If we reduced immigration and berry prices jump that’s not going to make people happy either.
There’s nothing good about the wages of say plumbers going up forever because of an undersupply of labor (vs. increases in productivity). That’s economic stagnation. You can’t just focus on wages; you also have to consider that consumers pay the higher prices to fund the higher wages. Absent increases in productivity, higher wages mean less consumption due to higher prices and/or shortages. In other words, it’s a poorer place overall.
Remittances aren’t a major variable because I strongly doubt they are large enough to be a significant factor (prove me wrong), criticizing people for how they choose to spend their money is generally bad, and also foreigners receiving the money probably buy some international goods, including from America. Yay globalization.
My point about China is that it’s not a valid criticism of economic policy based on free trade, it’s a valid criticism of geopolitical policy. Free trade in general is great, but not when it’s with the USSR and China, or involves giving up key capabilities from a national security perspective. Europe, for example, was very stupid to become so reliant on Russian gas.
The Rust Belt failed to be competitive as economic needs changed. That’s on them. Compare them to the economic growth in the south and southwest over the same time period.
I don’t think you grasped my point about how restricting the US labor supply strengthens the incentives for companies to go looking for labor overseas, because what you wrote is entirely in line with it.
Negatory
2yr ago
Assuming you didn’t accidentally respond to me vs. another commenter, I’ll take this as a compliment that I presented the facts in a way that someone could think I actually think Lindell has been wronged.
On a technical point, the court had to agree that the terms of the challenge were fulfilled, which means they believe the evidence provided by Lindell was in fact demonstrably false. So fans of Deep State theory can stay believers if they want to. “The rot runs even deeper than we thought.” (No one ever seems to explain how the Deep State tried so hard to defeat Trump in 2016 but failed so narrowly.)
If you look at my comment history, you’ll find we violently agree about Lindell and general claims of election fraud.
The most charitable I can be about someone like Lindell or Sidney Powell (or Trump) is that they are mentally ill, and not just straight out con(wo)men. I can’t use that for say a Giuliani or a Michael Flynn, given their past careers, and Dinesh D'Souza is a longstanding grifter.
Negatory
2yr ago
You should also consider that Hillary was doing what she did in the course of her duties as SecState and was permitted (stupidly) to have the server. She complied with the investigation.
Trump took very sensitive documents because he wanted to own them. He did not comply with the investigation.
Trump is being prosecuted because there was no way to let this level of violation slide.
Negatory
2yr ago
You’re wrong for at least four reasons.
First, Hillary as SecState was found to have some emails that should have been classified. State Dept lives in between classified and unclassified worlds and so these things are going to happen. So clearly dumb and bad, but not to the level meriting prosecution.
Second, Trump is known to have shared the classified information for his personal interest.
Third, Trump took some really classified stuff.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-are-the-classified-documents-in-the-trump-indictment
Fourth, he refused to comply, necessitating a formal effort to seize the documents.
Riots in 2020 were not reacting to Trump entering office.
So your sense of chronology seems a bit off.
I completely agree that things would have (almost certainly) gotten less out of hand if Hillary (or any Dem) had been president.
Not sure how that should influence your vote.
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